


Missing Enough To Feel All Right

by Omorka



Category: Real Ghostbusters
Genre: M/M, OOBE, Spirit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-21
Updated: 2010-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:08:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray gets knocked for a loop on a bust - all the way out of his own body!  The others try a number of techniques, from all their specialties, to bring him back home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing Enough To Feel All Right

**Author's Note:**

> This was hard to rate - it's certainly not very explicit, and yet it does have a slash sex scene in it, just not one involving genitals. Thanks to David Byrne and the Talking Heads for the title, which is from "And She Was."

"Look out, Winston!" Ray ducked his head and rolled to the side as a sliding partition wall came crashing down between the two of them. Somehow, the Class Five they'd been chasing had pulled it completely off of its track. This space had been a hotel once, but two owners ago it had been remodeled into a small version of a convention center, and it was filled with things the ghost could throw - tables, chairs, podiums, microphone stands, even a few pitchers full of warm water. They'd had ice in them at the beginning of the day, and rings of condensation still marked the tables where they'd sat, but then the ghost had shown up and the owners had evacuated the place.

Ray caught a glimpse of the spook as it turned the corner and fled back down the corridor. His first impression had been that it looked like a giant jellyfish, and it sort of did, luminescent and translucent, with a round dome of a body about five feet across and a cluster of tentacles trailing behind it. But its icy blue color was distinctly spectral, and that dome had a huge cartoonish face, wide-eyed, with a cheshire cat's grin. It also left even more slime than a jellyfish would; every table and chair it had snatched up and tossed at them was coated with the stuff, and while none of the Ghostbusters had been slimed directly (yet, although Peter was being rather vocal over the radio about expecting it at any moment), their uniforms were getting liberally smeared.

They'd split up to try and catch it between them when they arrived, almost an hour ago now. Peter and Egon had gone to the top floor to try and flush it downstairs, since the initial report had stated that it was first sighted up there, but no one had encountered it until Ray and Winston had worked their way up to the third level. It had then proceeded to throw furniture down the stairwells until they were almost unusable, at which point Peter had discovered that it had crammed the elevators full of chairs and tablecloths when they thought it was hiding. For a Class Five, it was unusually clever, and Egon and Ray had speculated over the handset radios what its strategy might be while Peter and Winston tried to clear one of the staircases.

That was when the specter had started throwing the furniture at them. Peter and Egon were on the fourth floor, just above them, and Winston and Ray were still on the third, but the ghost seemed to know exactly where everyone was, and used its ability to slip through the floors and ceilings to great advantage. It was now clearly trying to separate the teams on each floor, to corner one of them alone, and while so far they'd done a pretty good job of sticking together, the Class Five had been escalating its tactics.

Ray couldn't see Winston on the other side of the fallen wall, but he could hear him. "You all right?" he called.

A cough rang out, followed by Winston's voice. "I'm all right. Got a lot of dust in my throat. I'm going to have to go out the side door of this room to get back to you - meet me in the hallway we came from?"

"The ghost went out the way we came in. I'm going to try and catch up with it before it goes through the ceiling again; just come around from the other side - maybe we can pin it between us." Ray charged out the door, thrower in hand, in the direction that the Class Five had just gone, and whirled around the corner -

\- And the ghost dive-bombed him from less than ten feet away. Ray barely had time to think _Oh, no, I'm about to get royally slimed_ before it collided with him with a sickening thump.

Ray's vision went blurry, and his head swam, as if he were spinning wildly. His eyes closed involuntarily, and he couldn't think. He felt like the breath had been knocked out of him, although he wasn't struggling to get air. For a long few minutes, he just lay where he'd landed, stunned.

Slowly, he opened his eyes, to a white pebbly surface about a yard in front of him. Had the ghost thrown him against the wall? The walls all had that yellowish-beige wallpaper, didn't they? Ray reached towards it, but his fingers fell a few inches short.

Somewhere ahead of him, someone was shouting. He heard the sounds of proton streams; did that mean the ghost had gone back to the fourth floor and Peter and Egon had caught it? He hadn't heard them say they'd seen it on the radio, but he'd been dazed - maybe he'd missed it. Or possibly the radio had been slimed so badly it had stopped working.

Ray tried to roll over, and failed. That confused him; why hadn't that worked? He reached down to push himself off of the floor into a sitting position, and found nothing beneath him. Suddenly, he realized that he should have been lying on his pack - and he wasn't. He felt at his shoulder; the straps were gone. Had the ghost somehow stolen his proton pack? That would be really bad; he needed to warn the guys. His hand went to his belt for the radio, and closed on empty air.

He looked down at his hand. His belt was missing, along with all of his equipment. He still had his uniform on, it looked like, but he'd been stripped of everything else. The ecto-scopes weren't on his head, either, when he felt for them. That didn't make any sense. Had he been knocked unconscious? If so, was it for long enough for the ghost to have stripped him of his gear?

The noise of the streams stopped, but the yelling continued. Then one of the voices resolved into Peter's. _Oh, good, they did get it._ Ray relaxed a little bit, then tensed again when he heard Peter yelling his name.

"Ray! Ray, where are you? We got Moonface, here, without your help, even! Give us a sign, Tex, we're not leaving without you!"

"I'm here!" Ray called out, and tried again to push himself upright. Suddenly, he abruptly changed position and started to pivot around his middle. He flung out his arms to slow down the rotation, which seemed to work, and looked at his feet.

His boots were now pointed towards the floor, which was more than a yard beneath them.

He looked at the surface he'd thought was a wall. No, those were the ceiling tiles. Ray was floating in midair.

"Oh, boy! Oh, _no_," he exclaimed, and started flailing again, making swimming motions with his hands. Had the ghost pulled him through into the Flip Side again? He tried to remember how he'd flown when he, Peter, and Egon had been accidentally transported into a world where ghosts were the normal reality and humans were the supernatural creatures. He heard several pairs of boots on the other side of the ceiling - the guys must be getting closer.

"RAY!" Peter screeched. Ray looked around frantically before realizing that the shout had still come from above him. But how could Peter see him from up there?

"Ray, my man, hang on, we're coming!" And that was Winston. Two pairs of boots thudded to a location immediately above his head. There was a moment of silence, followed by Winston saying something Ray couldn't make out. Then there was the crackle of the radio, and Peter's voice doubled - once from him, once from Winston's receiver.

"Egon, we're back in Corridor E on the third floor. We've found Ray - he's out cold, but he's breathing and his heart-rate is steady. He's also been slimed like you wouldn't believe. Moonface may have brained him with a chair or something - we don't see an obvious head injury, though."

The radio crackled again, and Egon's reply came from both receivers. "I'll be there in just a second. If you think he's suffered a head injury, moving him before the paramedics get there is contraindicated. Have you called 911 yet?"

"I'm on it." That was Winston's voice, then one pair of boots thudded away.

Corridor E on the third floor? But that was where Ray was, wasn't he?

Unless the ghost had pushed him through the ceiling? But that was crazy, wasn't it? Then again, if you needed a man to believe something crazy, Ray was your guy. He screwed up his face in concentration, and _willed_ himself to move upwards.

Somewhat to his surprise, it worked. He rose to the ceiling, and passed through it as if it weren't even there, through the dark crawlspace between the tiles and the concrete of the floor above, then through floor and carpeting. He emerged in the hallway he'd been in when Moonface had slammed him, about ten feet further down. Winston was nowhere to be seen, but Peter was kneeling on the floor, next to -

Next to Ray's body.

"Oh, wow, I'm having an out-of-body experience," sighed Ray. Then he grinned. "This is great! We always knew this was possible, but to actually experience it! And now we know that physical contact with an etheric entity can induce an OOBE - hey, Peter, it's me, I'm over here!" Ray waved, but Peter could obviously neither hear him nor see him.

He drifted closer, and realized that Peter was talking, very softly. "Ray, buddy, I don't know if you can hear me, but you're gonna be fine. Winston's got help coming right now, and we got the gooper who did this to you. We're gonna take care of you."

"Of course you are, Peter! It'll be fine, I'm fine, I'm right here, oh, shoot, you can't hear me even up close." Ray was perplexed; he'd hoped that he'd be able to impose on Peter's consciousness when he got near enough. He reached out to tap Peter on the shoulder, and his hand went right through him; Peter shuddered a bit, but gave no other sign of having noticed the contact.

"Well, darn." Ray was trying to think of some other way of alerting Peter to his presence when Egon came charging around the corner. "I apologize, Peter; I miscalculated which corridor led back here. Is Ray regaining consciousness?"

"You got lost, Spengs? I thought you had a photographic memory." Peter's voice was teasing, light, but his eyes were serious.

"My powers of recall may be prodigious, but I admit that they are not perfect. Besides, I had not been on this floor previously, and the layout on the floor above us is significantly different. You didn't answer my question about Ray." The physicist was frowning, his eyes narrowed with concern.

Peter sighed and shifted from crouching to sitting with his pack against the wall. "There's no change from earlier. He's breathing just fine, his heartbeat's steady, and his pupils react to light, but he's out cold. And he's covered in slime, which is gonna chill him if we don't cover him up with something."

"I'll get a few tablecloths from the conference rooms. They're not very heavy, but they should retain some body heat." Egon glanced down at his PKE meter, which was blinking. "Hmm."

"Is that the 'this slime has an unusual molecular structure' hmm, the 'there's another ghost in here that we need to bust' hmm, or the 'reality is about to break down and we're all gonna die' hmm?" Peter's voice was steadier than it had been. Ray hoped that meant he wasn't worrying about him.

"None of those, although closest to the penultimate one. There are some unusual PKE residuals in here, much stronger than I would expect a Class Five to leave. In fact, just from the PKE variances, I would have said there was an active Class Four present. But there's absolutely no ectoplasmic reading from it - just from the slime left by, uh, 'Moonface,' as you called it, and it gives off normal Class Five residuals." Egon's eyebrows drew together in thought. "Has this building been haunted previously?"

"If it had, the manager didn't mention it. Is it dangerous?" Peter obviously disliked the idea that they'd been sent in with incomplete information.

"Not enough data to tell. Let me get those tablecloths, and I'll take another set of readings. Keep your pack handy, though." Egon headed through the nearest door.

Peter dropped the facade as soon as Egon couldn't see him. Worry coursed through his face, and his hand dropped to Ray's body's shoulder. "Hang in there, buddy," he whispered. "We'll take care of you."

"I know you will," answered Ray, forgetting that Peter couldn't hear him. "Well, gosh, this has been a great experience - gee, I'm a Class Four! - but I'd better stop worrying you guys, huh?" He turned around - now that he knew what do to to move, it was easy; it was just figuring it out initially that was hard - and dropped back into his body.

He fell right through it into the crawlspace again.

"Whoops!" Ray couldn't see much in the crawlspace; he wasn't sure whether he really needed light to see, even without his body, or if it was just his expectations affecting his perception. He pushed himself back through the floor and found he was about a foot off. He edged over and very carefully lined himself up with the flesh he'd worn all his life.

Nothing happened. No rush of blood, no feeling of sinking back in or connecting. It didn't feel much different from passing through the floor.

"Uh-oh," he murmured.

Egon returned, both arms full of white polyester. He shook one of the crumpled tablecloths out and laid it across Ray. The engineer had hoped that the feel of the makeshift sheet would help him find his body again, but all he got was a faint fluttering as the tablecloth passed through him. Discouraged, he pushed himself back to an upright position, just above his own head and a foot or so off the floor. It was sort of funny to be looking down at Egon for once, but Ray realized that novelty was going to wear off very, very quickly.

"Anything?" asked Egon, his bass voice cracking with deep concern. Peter looked up with the same emotion in his eyes, and shook his head. "Still breathing just fine, but no sign that he's waking up, either." He sighed. "That's bad, isn't it? The longer he's out, the more likely it is that there's serious damage." Egon nodded, and glanced at his meter again.

Ray shifted to directly in front of Egon. "Egon, I'm right here, detect me!" He waved his arms around.

Egon scowled. "Peter, this is highly unusual. The Class Five residuals are fading like normal, except where there is ectoplasmic residue. The Class Four residuals are not. Worse, they seem to be moving around." He adjusted his glasses and peered at the meter, then looked right through Ray's midsection. "Can you remove Ray's ecto-scopes and hand them to me?"

"Wouldn't that involve moving his head? I thought we said we didn't want to do that." Peter looked at his friend's still form and pursed his lips.

"No, of course you're right, Peter. And there's still no Class Four ectoplasmic reading at all. It's not possible to have a ghost without ectoplasm. But this is very strange." Egon reached back and checked his proton thrower, and Ray realized with a start that if Egon _did_ detect him, and didn't recognize him, his first impulse was going to be to bust him.

"Oh, geez, Egon, please don't zap me," started Ray, before remembering that neither of his friends could hear him. He started to move away from the meter, hoping that Egon would be less concerned if the unexplained readings weren't close enough to be threatening, when Winston arrived.

"We've got an ambulance on the way. They said not to move him, even if he comes around. How's he doing?" Winston ducked his head to look at Ray's body for himself, getting between Ray and his physical form.

That reminded Ray of something. Wasn't there supposed to be a silver cord connecting his astral body to his real one? He looked around, but he didn't see one. _That_ was problematic - that was supposed to be the 'emergency recall' connection. Was that why he couldn't get back into his body? Had Moonface somehow managed to snap his connection to his flesh and blood when he'd thrown him out of it? And why hadn't Moonface possessed the empty body?

That thought would have made Ray's blood run cold if he'd been in the same place his blood was. Was it possible he had, and the Moonface that the guys had captured was an illusion? No, then Egon would still be reading an active Class Five. Unless Moonface could mask his signature somehow, but that was generally a Class Seven trick. This just didn't make any sense.

Ray dove for his body again, and passed straight through it, then through Winston, who shuddered. "Man, is there a draft in here? The A/C just come on or what?"

Egon's brow furrowed, and he twiddled a knob on the PKE meter. "The Class Four residuals are persisting, and they still appear to be moving around. I'm concerned that they may be focusing on Ray in his vulnerable state."

"Keep alert, guys. We're not letting anything get through to our little buddy here." Peter drew his thrower, although he didn't power it up. Egon's mouth twitched, and he pulled his thrower as well.

"Aw, guys, please," murmured Ray. He was touched by their determination to protect him, but it was making it difficult for him to get back into himself. He drifted a few yards down the hallway, and waited for them to relax.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen; Egon explained the anomalous readings to Winston, who took up a position opposite Peter and held his thrower like a shield. They stayed like that, tense and on high alert, until the paramedics came pounding up the stairs.

"Oh, crud, the elevators. We don't want them to have to carry Ray down the stairs," exclaimed Winston, and he rushed off towards the lobby. Peter looked torn between protecting Ray and getting him out of there safely. Egon laid one hand on Peter's shoulder and murmured softly, "Go help with the elevator. I'll stay here and keep an eye on these readings." Venkman bowed his head for a moment, said "I'll be right back" more towards Ray's limp form than to Egon, and jogged off after Winston.

One of the paramedics stood up. "Well, if he weren't still unconscious, I wouldn't recommend transporting him. There's no swelling or bruising on the head that we can see. Are you sure he has a head injury?"

"He was alone when he was knocked out," reported Egon, "so we don't have complete information on what occurred. The specter was throwing furniture, however, and it seemed logical that he would have knocked Ray out that way."

The paramedic nodded. "There's no sign of a neck or back injury. We'll need to remove his pack and equipment." Egon nodded, and gathered up the ecto-scopes and Ray's proton pack as the medics took them off. They slid Ray onto a rolling stretcher as Winston arrived again. "Pete and I have one elevator in working order. We'll take the stairs and meet you down there."

"All right. Which way is the elevator?" The paramedic who appeared to be in charge, an older man with a salt-and-pepper walrus mustache, followed Winston to the lobby with one hand guiding the stretcher; the other, a woman with a deep mahogany complexion and very short hair, pushed in silence. Egon followed, Ray's equipment slung over one shoulder and his PKE meter still out, watching the screen. He was scowling, and the lines between his eyebrows were getting deeper by the second.

Peter wasn't by the elevators, although a large pile of chairs testified to his and Winston's efforts. Ray guessed that Peter was downstairs already. No, he could check that; he didn't have to guess, did he? Ray willed himself downwards, and the second floor slipped past him, followed by the ceiling of the ground floor lobby. Yup, there was Peter, standing by the elevator doors. Winston charged out of the cleared stairwell at about the same time the elevator opened, discharging the paramedics and Ray's body, followed by Egon, whose expression changed from relief to concern again.

"What's the story?" Winston gestured at Egon's PKE meter.

"The Class Four PKE readings faded when we entered the elevator, but they're back now. I am still detecting no ectoplasmic readings at all. This shouldn't be possible." Egon glared at the meter, as if the anomalous readings were its fault, and then up at empty air a few feet to Ray's left. "One of us should accompany Ray in the ambulance, and keep track of these readings. I am concerned that they might represent a psychokinetic assault of some sort."

Peter and Winston exchanged a look, and Ray could tell that Peter was struggling with his own need to see that his younger friend was safe, and his knowledge that Egon was more expert with the meters. "Okay, Spengs, if someone's gotta guard him with a meter, it probably ought to be you. But we'll trade off shifts when we get to the hospital, okay?"

Egon nodded. "Of course, Peter. Hopefully, by then these irregular readings will have dispersed and Ray will return to consciousness unimpeded."

"Aw, Egon, c'mon," Ray pleaded as he floated into the ambulance, hovering a few inches above his body. It was odd, looking at himself like this. Usually when a person sees himself, he's looking in a mirror, but now he was seeing himself the way everyone else usually saw, him, not mirror-reversed. That bit of his jaw that was just a little thicker was on the right side, not the left, and if his body's eyes had been open, the eye that was lighter would be swapped, too.

The thought of looking into his own sightless eyes made him feel dizzy. He shifted so he was looking at Egon's PKE meter, instead, as the female paramedic climbed into the driver's seat and started the ambulance. For a moment, Ray worried that the ambulance would zoom off and leave him in the street, but as the emergency vehicle lurched into traffic, he found that it took only light concentration on his part to define his position in terms of the ambulance and his body, traveling along with them.

Yup, the PKE meter read him as a Class Four psychokinetic entity and didn't read him at all as an ectoplasmic entity. Well, that made sense; while his body was coated with etheric slime, none of it had come with him when he'd been forced out of his body. Wow, he was a really strong Class Four, too, almost the top of the scale for that type of spirit. Was that just because he still had a body?

Egon looked around the cramped space of the ambulance, then at the paramedic sitting on Ray's other side. The physicist's mouth made a hard, tight line.

Ray reached out and tried to tap Egon on the shoulder. His fingers sank into his friend's uniform and through his skin, and Egon shivered.

"Egon, it's me, it's Ray, I'm here!" Ray shouted with all the force he had in him. The antennae on the meter stirred, and it gave out a warble. Egon's eyes widened, and he stared at the meter, then at Ray's unconscious form, then at the meter again, then out into the air in Ray's general direction.

Egon slipped on the ecto-scopes, their lights blinking, and scanned the ambulance. Ray shifted position, one hand still on Egon's arm, the other waving in front of his face. If Egon saw anything, he didn't react; after a few seconds, he tugged the goggles off again.

Ray watched Egon's eyebrows draw together in a thoughtful frown, and withdrew his hand sadly. His friends clearly reacted to his touch, so maybe he could use that to communicate with them, but they couldn't hear him. And of course the ecto-scopes couldn't see him; they reacted to ectoplasm, not to PKE energy.

Despite being in the company of a medical professional and one of his two oldest friends, Ray was beginning to feel terribly alone.

\---

Janine's hand dropped onto Winston's shoulder, startling him awake. "It's my turn, Winston. Go back to the waiting room and catch a nap. Better yet, see if you can get those two to get some sleep." Her bottom lip puckered with worry. "They're not going to be any use to Ray or anyone, if they keep this up."

Zeddemore stretched, and climbed to his feet with a sort of graceful looseness that belied how tired he was. He squeezed Ray's body's arm. "I'm gonna step out now, old buddy, but Janine's right here, and she's gonna keep an eye on you for a while. You listen to her, okay?"

"I've been listening to all of you," complained Ray. He was currently floating slightly over his own head, legs tucked into a half-lotus; it gave him the illusion that they were talking to him when they addressed the lump of flesh beneath him. It also meant that he didn't have to look at his own face. Not that he found himself ugly, but looking at himself looking like a corpse was creeping him right out. Neither one of them could hear him, of course.

The past few hours were a blur of surreal images for him. Watching the doctors poking at his body from the outside, remarking at his lack of responsiveness, drawing blood (that had almost caused a panic attack, although he couldn't explain why; it had never caused a problem when he was in the body they were poking the needle into), and finally putting him in an ICU unit had taken hours, and none of them had heard him no matter how much he shouted. They had, in the course of admitting him, removed his ectoplasm-soaked jumpsuit and the jeans and sweater he'd been wearing underneath, and a nurse had swabbed most of the slime off of him, but the body on the bed still had its hair plastered to its head. Crud, he was thinking of his own body as an "it." _That can't possibly be good,_ he thought. It was also connected to more wires and tubes than he cared to count. The one good thing was that it was breathing on its - no, _he_ was breathing enough on _his_ own, he wasn't going to divorce himself from his own body just because he happened to be three feet above it at the moment - that they hadn't intubated him. There was a little oxygen tube running under his nose, but he'd heard the doctors admitting that it probably wasn't necessary.

Peter had insisted on taking the first shift - regular visitor hours were over, but the nurses were grudgingly allowing one of his teammates at a time to sit with him in the room, mostly because they knew the Ghostbusters would cause more trouble if they didn't let them. He'd talked the whole time. He'd assured Ray that they'd caught Moonface, he'd joked that Ray was missing his favorite cartoons, he'd reminded Ray that a new issue of Captain Steel was coming out in four days (Ray was surprised that Peter remembered that, actually - Peter occasionally browsed through Ray's comic books if he left them lying around, but showed no interest in the subject otherwise), he'd complained that the ectoplasmic charge converter that Ray and Egon were working on kept tripping the circuit breakers for the lab, he'd groused about missing dinner, he'd scolded Ray for worrying poor Egon like this, and once, when the nurses were all distracted by a patient in another room in the unit, he'd pressed Ray's body's hand between his own pale and shaking palms and begged Ray to wake up. Ray had tried to hug him, which had only made Peter shiver and complain about the air conditioning in the room, and then tried to dive back into his body again, which was no more successful than it had been before.

Egon had arrived to spell Peter and send him to get something to eat after an hour and a half. He mentioned that Janine had arrived, and Ray had made the mistake of drifting out to the waiting area to see her. She'd obviously been crying; her eyes were red, and she was just short of scolding Peter and Winston for letting Ray go off by himself. Ray had protested that it wasn't their fault, that Winston had been right next to him until Moonface had thrown the folding wall at them, but of course she hadn't heard, and their reactions said all too clearly that they took her angry words to heart. Ray had returned to the room and set off the PKE meter, which resulted in Egon spending most of his time in the room pointing the meter in different directions and replaying the readings he'd taken at the convention center. He occasionally explained to Ray - or at least, to the body on the bed - what he was doing with the meter, and why.

"C'mon, Egon," Ray had whispered, breathlessly. "Detect me. It's me. I'm right here." But Egon merely told his body that he would attempt to protect him from outside PKE influences.

By the time Winston arrived to spell Egon, it was creeping up on midnight. He'd talked to Ray for the first quarter-hour or so, assuring him that the rest of them were okay, insisting that Ray would be up and out of here soon, and generally trying to be optimistic. But he'd soon sunk into concerned silence. After another half hour, he'd nodded off, and honestly, Ray was relieved. The last thing he wanted was his friends so worried about him that they neglected their own needs.

Winston ambled towards the waiting room after napping for about an hour, and Janine took the chair next to the bed. She surreptitiously removed a PKE meter from the windbreaker she was wearing, and set it on the tray table. "Egon wants to keep track of the thing-that's-not-a-Class-Four, Ray," she murmured, plucking the meter's antennae out and turning it on. The antennae flickered and fluttered lightly; she dialed the sound to zero and set it on the table. "That'll record its movements. He thinks it's related to why you won't wake up, but he won't tell Peter that. He wants Peter to try to get some sleep. _I_ want _Egon_ to get some sleep. God, Ray, I hope you're okay in there."

"I'm okay, Janine," he responded, knowing that talking back was fruitless but not able to stop himself. "I'm _fine,_ I'm just not _in_ there."

The antennae quivered again. Janine glanced at it, then her eyes flicked across the room, as if she'd seen something moving. Ray unfolded his astral legs and glided over to stay in her gaze. She blinked, then slid her eyes towards the door. Ray followed, pulling himself upright, feet floating a few inches above the floor. Again, she flicked her eyes back and forth, then slid off her glasses and rubbed them with her knuckles.

"Must be tired," she mumbled.

"I'm sure you are. Gosh, this has got to be terrible for all of you. I wish there were something I could do to let you know I'm okay. Except for not being able to get back in my body, I mean." Ray sighed, and drew his knees up to his chest.

Janine had closed her eyes again. A vibration passed through Ray, as if a loud noise had sounded and the sound wave had struck him - but he wasn't feeling normal sound vibrations in his current state.

"Janine, did you do that?" Ray focused on her. She seemed more solid, somehow, than before, almost like she was just beginning to glow. Did that make sense? Normally, he wouldn't have associated light emission with solidity, but right now they seemed connected somehow. He drifted over and set one hand on her arm, the one she wasn't holding his body's hand with. Immediately he heard, as if someone were shouting far away, _Ray, please come back, wake up, we need you!_

"Janine, I'm right here!" He forced the words out with all his might. The PKE meter fluttered, and Janine inhaled sharply and sat up.

Again, her eyes flicked across the room. "Ray?"

He breezed around her, laying his hands on either side of her head, her eyes filling his field of view. "Janine, I'm sorry I'm shouting at you, but it's me, it's Ray, I'm here!"

Janine let go of Ray's body's hand and fumbled for the PKE meter. She shook her head sharply, once - then she stood up abruptly and ran from the room.

Ray sank back down, sitting somewhere in the middle of the mattress. "Crap." He hadn't meant to scare her. This was not good. Now the others were going to think the 'Class Four' was dangerous and try to figure out how to bust him even though he wasn't ectoplasmic.

The clatter of high heels approached the room again, accompanied by another set of footsteps. Guessing from how far apart they were, and assuming that they were keeping up with the heels, that had to be Egon's long-legged stride. Janine burst back into the room, shoving the meter back into Egon's hands.

She pointed at the body. "Try it right now." Ray rose and peeled away from the bed; if Egon was going to direct something at him, he wanted to be out of the blast radius. He ended up halfway out of the room, through the curtain that divided it from the main body of the ICU. Peter and Winston were approaching on tiptoe from the same direction Egon and Janine had just come; Peter looked like hell. One of the nurses was on the phone, glaring at them.

The PKE meter made an odd sort of squeal. Ray popped back into the room instinctively, his curiosity overcoming his self-preservation. The meter was set for electrometabolic biorhythms now, he realized; Egon was reading the body on the bed.

That was not his usual biorhythm reading. Ray had memorized the entire team's, as had Egon, although of course it was easier for the physicist with his near-photographic memory. "Uh-oh. What's wrong with me?"

Egon set the meter to save its current reading, then began twiddling dials. The screen fuzzed out, went blank, and then sprang back to life. Now it was reading PKE signatures again, and it was picking up the half-a-Class-Four readings.

Egon nodded. "Janine, will you please go get Peter? I hate to wake him, but this is his specialty more than mine."

"Actually, I'm right here, Egon," confessed Peter, slinking into the room from the other side of the curtain, where he and Winston had been eavesdropping.

It was a measure of how deep in thought Egon was that he didn't spare a moment to chastise them. "Ah, good. Peter, do you remember those experiments in clairaudience we did during your doctoral work?"

"Like it was yesterday. That was after I stopped drinking every weekend." Peter grinned; it was mostly a joke. While Peter had cultivated the frathouse jock image to the hilt in his undergraduate days, he had always known how to pace himself, and in fact drank significantly less than his reputation suggested. He'd explained this to Ray at the time by pointing out that if one got _too_ drunk at a party, one wasn't likely to be up for sex afterwards, and he preferred getting laid to getting smashed. Ray grinned at the memory, and was suddenly wistful; normally, that memory would have made him blush furiously, but this form didn't have blood vessels to dilate like that. The familiar heat failed to grace his cheeks. _Damn, I want my body back._

"Good." Egon nodded. "I would like to try an experiment. In order not to bias the results, I will explain afterwards. Would you please attempt to, um, 'hear with your inner ear,' Peter?"

Peter blinked at Egon for a moment, looking at him with the expression of a man trying to determine if a joke has just been told at his expense. Egon was very good at keeping a straight face, but there was no trace of anything other than dignified gravity in his expression. The parapsychologist sighed, dropped into the chair, brought his hands to his temples, and closed his eyes.

After a long pause, Peter's eyes shifted under his eyelids, and he lowered his hands. Something changed in the atmosphere in the room; Janine shifted her weight nervously. Ray looked at Peter again; somehow, his friend looked more solid than he had before - and like Janine had before, as if there were a soft green light somewhere behind him, or maybe _in_ him.

Egon nodded, silently passed the PKE meter to Winston, and closed his eyes. Winston took it, and looked a question at Janine. Janine held her breath.

Moving so that he was more or less standing in front of Peter, Ray leaned forward. He remembered the experiments Egon was talking about; they'd started during the summer he'd spent in private industry, but they'd used him as a test subject during the weekends he'd visited them, and then again when he'd returned to academia that fall.

Egon's eyes half-opened, blue crescents under heavy lids, unfocused. Was he starting to glow, too? Ray couldn't quite tell.

Ray leaned forward. "Peter? Can you hear me?"

Peter jumped into the air and out of his trance like he'd been stuck with a pin. "Ray!" Egon, startled in turn by Peter's reaction, stepped back, his eyes flying all the way open. The breath Janine had been holding rushed out with a squeak. Ray jumped back and ended up more or less sitting on his own chest.

"Will someone _please_ tell me what the heck is up? Preferably before the nurses throw us out of here?" Winston demanded.

"Too late," growled a deep female voice from behind the curtain.

Egon looked apologetic as the head nurse on duty brushed into the cubicle, five feet six inches of steaming irritation. "I'm sorry. We think that - "

"Whatever you think, it's gonna have to wait," she snapped, brushing past Egon and unhooking one of the leads connecting Ray's body to the monitors. An orderly came up behind her, his uniform rumpled - he had the bleary look of someone working far too long a shift. "Since your friend here is stable, we're moving him from the ICU to a regular room. You can't keep interrupting the other patients' sleep like this, unless you're trying to drum up new business by producing a few new angry haunts."

Chastised, the four fell silent as the orderly unlocked the wheels on the hospital cot and rolled Ray's body to the elevator. They tiptoed behind him, Ray following above them like a kite on a string.

\---

Winston closed the door of Room 1238 as Peter claimed the only chair. At least it was a private room, even if it was barely larger than the ICU cubicle. "Now, Egon, about that explanation you were about to give me?"

"I'm sorry, Winston. I would have explained beforehand, but I didn't want to bias the experiment. When Peter and I were both working towards our doctorates in parapsychology, one of the things we studied was clairsentience. Do you remember the Zener tests we performed on you after you were hired?" Egon unconsciously adjusted the tray table next to the cot; Ray drifted over him and settled over his body's chest again.

"That was all those tests with the cards, right?" Winston responded. Egon nodded. "Yeah, I remember."

Peter broke in. "There are a number of different aspects of ESP. The one it's easiest to test for is telepathy - direct mind-to-mind communication - and it's the one there's the best evidence for. The hardest one to test consistently for is precognition, the ability to see or otherwise sense events before they occur." Peter glanced away for a fraction of a second. He'd demonstrated a potential gift for this one on several occasions, often enough that it no longer surprised Egon or Ray very much, but Peter tried to deny it as often as not. The idea offended his concept of free will, despite his having experienced it and still being as willful as ever. "Anyway, there's a whole bunch, but the other ones that're fairly easy to test for are the clair-senses. Clairvoyance is the ability to see things at a distance; clairaudience is the ability to hear things you shouldn't be able to; and there're also ones for the other three senses, although they're pretty rare. Egon and I did a whole bunch of tests on each other and on Ray to try and get some ideas for more rigorous research." He rubbed at his temples and chuckled a bit at the memory; Egon had had some wild ideas for experimental protocols. "Anyway, one of the things we discovered was that I scored better on clairaudience tests than they did, and they scored better on clairvoyance tests than I did, but we all had to, well, sort of un-focus our minds to get it to work at all. We never did get it to work consistently."

Egon smiled. "What Peter is not telling you, in an uncharacteristic display of modesty, is that on _one_ occasion, he got a perfect score."

"It doesn't matter," shrugged Peter. "I mean, it scared the crap out of me when it happened, but one trial is not a data set, and we never got it to happen again."

"At any rate, what I just asked Peter to do was to put himself in the same state he was in when that trial occurred. I was attempting to recreate the mental state I had on some of our more successful clairvoyance trials. I believe my results were interesting but inconclusive. Peter seems to have gathered more conclusive data." Peter smirked at the physicist, who inclined his head slightly. "Forgive me. He appears to have gathered one potentially telling datum."

"I wouldn't even describe it as a datum, but yeah. I heard Ray say my name just as clearly as I can hear the rest of you talking. He said something else too, I think it was a question, but my concentration was sort of broken at that point." Peter's voice dropped as if it were an apology.

"Could you tell where the voice was located, Peter?" Egon's tone was eager and gentle in equal, and opposing, measures.

Peter's brow furrowed. "It sounded as if it were right in front of me, more or less where it would have come from if he were standing here," he gestured where Ray had been, relative to Peter, back in the previous room. "But clair-senses aren't localized like that."

Egon nodded. "True, but that matches my perceptions. I am not as adept in this area as you are, but I believe I saw something like a . . . hollow outline in the same general space."

"So what does it all mean?" interrupted Winston.

"I measured Ray's electrometabolic biorhythms when Janine brought me into the ICU cubicle," continued Egon. "They are somewhat depressed, which might simply be a result of his current unconscious state, and missing a significant proportion of their high harmonics, which cannot be so explained."

"Let me guess. The Class Four readings you've been picking up since the convention center - they show those same high harmonics that are missing in his biorhythm readings?" Winston looked hopeful.

"Precisely." Satisfaction played at Egon's lips.

"So that means Ray's here, in the room with us, just not where he belongs?" asked Janine, hope ringing in the corners of her voice.

Peter stood back up, frowning. "Well, in that case, get back in here, Ray!" He pointed firmly at Ray's limp body's chest, sticking his finger directly into Ray's astral form's stomach. Ray scooted back and whined, "What do you think I've been trying to do, Peter?" Peter shivered and withdrew his hand.

"What happened?" Egon looked over the PKE meter at Peter.

"I don't know. Wait, let me think about that. You know how when Slimer's not being very solid, and he accidentally passes through part of you?"

"Yes."

"You know how it feels really cold?"

"Yes." Egon looked impatient, now.

"How much of that is just the slime, and how much is simple contact with a ghost?"

"It's probably not possible to separate the effects. You can't have a ghost without ectoplasm - oh." Egon's eyes widened as he saw what Peter was getting at. He shifted the meter to his left hand, and stretched out his right arm into the same space Peter had poked at. Ray caught on at the same time, and reached out to take Egon's hand in his, passing right through it again. Egon's eyebrows went up.

Peter sank back into the chair, eyes flickering closed, hands at his temples again. He breathed deeply, slowly, forcing his body to relax. There was definitely a green flicker behind him, like late summer morning sunlight through leaves.

Egon looked into the space where his hand and Ray's had just been, and asked "Are you there, Ray?"

"Yes, Egon, I'm right here! I'm here. I can't get back in my body, though." He looked at Peter, whose hands had fallen into his lap; he looked almost as torpid as Ray's body. "Peter, can you hear me? Please, Peter, please be able to hear me. I'm fine. The ghost, what did you call it, Moonface, it slammed into me and knocked me out of my body and I can't get back in it. Every time I try, I just fall through. This is really fascinating, I've never had a real out-of-body experience before and I'm taking all kinds of notes about what I can and can't do, but I'm starting to get scared and I really, really want to just get back in my body now." Not having to breathe seemed to result in his sentences being even more run-on than usual.

Peter was still for a moment, then his head slipped back and he shook it gently to rouse himself. "Yeah, Egon, he's there. I could hear him just fine. But I can't talk to him while I'm under like that, and I can't tell you what he's saying." A shadow flickered across his eyes. "He's scared, Egon. He says he can't get back in his body."

Egon frowned. "What if we hypnotized you, Peter? I know you can talk and stay in trance when you're under hypnosis; I've seen you do it."

"I don't know if I'd be receptive enough to hear him." Peter glowered. "I know you guys say this all the time, but it's a new experience for me - I think I'm gonna have to hit the reference books. We might have to figure out how to do a mediumship trance and let me channel him."

"It doesn't have to be you, Peter," Egon interjected.

"Who else? Egon, you're too much of a skeptic; it takes forever to hypnotize you."

"It worked on me that one time you guys used it to get me to remember where Slimer hid Ecto's keys," objected Janine. "Weren't most mediums women? Maybe you should let me try."

"Actually, some of the most successful were men, although the vast majority were probably no more on the up-and-up than my dad," objected Peter. "And you don't have anything close to the training we have."

"And I don't know how to channel through someone, anyway," Ray pointed out, forgetting that they couldn't hear him.

"Why have I never heard you guys talking about all this stuff?" Winston was managing to keep up, but his training hadn't touched much on Peter's ESP research.

"It never seemed very relevant to busting ghosts." Peter shrugged. "I haven't used most of it in years, myself." He sighed. "And now I'm rusty. I mean, I still read all the journal articles -"

"You _read,_ Dr. V.?" Janine's tone was light.

He stuck his tongue out at her. " - but I haven't even tested us to see if repeated exposure to ectoplasm has raised our psi ratings. I should haul the cards back out."

"Preferably without the electrodes this time," smiled Egon, and was rewarded with a glare from Peter.

"Anyway, all of my stuff on OOBEs is back at the firehouse, too." Peter bit at his bottom lip, thinking. Ray realized with a start that he didn't even know which of the books and journals stacked in Peter's office area were his psychology library and which were his parapsychology references. Given Peter's housekeeping habits, they might not even be separated.

Janine pursed her lips. "Hey guys, I have an idea. I'm going to go get something from my apartment - it's closer than the firehouse - and come right back. It'll take me a couple of hours to get there and back. You guys all need to get some sleep - I saw you almost nod off there, Dr. V. - so why don't you go back out to the new waiting room and try and catch a nap. If this works, then great. If it doesn't, then at least you guys will have gotten a little sleep before you try to drive Ecto back to the firehouse."

"But we can't leave Ray here alone." Peter gestured at Ray's body.

Janine's mouth quirked up. "If he's out-of-body, he can come with you to the waiting room, can't he?"

The other three Ghostbusters exchanged sheepish looks as Ray and Janine chuckled. She took Peter and Egon by the hand and led them back in the direction of the waiting room, with Winston straggling behind and Ray trailing in the rear, like a balloon in their wake.

\---

Janine tried to sneak into the waiting room, so as not to wake the sleeping Ghostbusters up, but Egon was dozing so lightly, the click of her heels on the tile floor was enough to startle him into alertness. His jump, in turn, jostled Peter enough to wake him up. And when Peter saw what their secretary had tucked under her arm, his groan of "Aw, Janine, you've gotta be kidding me!" finally made Winston sit up and blink.

"You got a good reason why it won't work?" Janine asked, shifting the tote bag on her shoulder.

Egon adjusted his glasses and looked perturbed. "Janine, why do you own a Ouija board?"

"Don't lecture me, mister," she snapped. "I didn't buy it. When my sister Margot was in college, her roommate was into all this sort of stuff - crystals and earth energy and herbal medicine and all that. And she bought this to try and contact her animal spirit guide or something. How an animal spirit was supposed to be able to spell, I dunno. Anyway, they only used it twice - she invited all the women on their wing of the dorms, said it was supposed to be healing to have all that female energy around. The first time it was all white light and angels and that sort of crap. The second time, it started talking about - I think her name was Rachel - anyway, the past lives of one of the other women, and it described some pretty awful things happening to her, and she freaked out. So Margot's roommate decided it was full of 'negativity,' bad vibes or something, so she gave it to Margot and told her to get rid of it. Margot gave it to me and said to hide it off campus. It's been between Monopoly and Scrabble ever since."

"Wow," Ray exclaimed before he remembered no one could hear him, "I wonder if they just scared themselves, or if there really was a past-life memory activated by the experience?"

"Janine, you know they just spooked each other, right?" Peter looked like it was an insult to his professional reputation to even be in the same room as the plaything.

She shrugged. "I figured, but honestly, it didn't matter to me at the time. I never used it; I figured if any ghosts needed to talk to me they could come do it themselves. But anyway, if you've gotta be kind of out of it to talk to Ray, I figured maybe you could just hypnotize yourself, or whatever it is you're doing, a little bit and let your subconscious do the work of pushing the pointer around. That's how these are supposed to work, right? It's little tiny motions from your subconscious that the board magnifies?"

Peter looked a little less skeptical. "Well, that's the theory, anyway."

"It could work," stated Egon. "Long before these were commercialized, some respectable mediums used 'talking boards' of similar design."

"Yeah, and a whole lot of frauds did, too," objected Peter. "These belong more to my dad's profession than ours."

"It couldn't hurt to try it," added Winston, shrugging. "I thought maybe you were going to bring Slimer back, to see if he could see Ray."

Janine's hand went to her mouth. "I didn't even think of that."

"That would be bad," stated Egon flatly.

The others exchanged a glance. Peter took the bait, finally. "Okay, what does 'bad' mean tonight, big guy?"

"Right now, Ray reads as a psychokinetic entity, but not an ectoplasmic one. That's because he still has a physical body; he's just not correctly connected to it. You can think of ectoplasm as the physical manifestation of a spectral entity; the psychokinetic energy is what allows it to think, move, and stay together, but the ectoplasm is what actually interacts with the physical world." Egon activated the PKE meter; it blipped, and he aimed it roughly in Ray's direction. "As long as Ray's 'home' is still his normal body, he would only be able to manipulate physical objects through telekinesis. If he were in contact with a source of ectoplasm, I theorize that his astral form would begin picking up an ectoplasmic field, which would allow him to begin interacting with other objects again, and possibly even become visible - but his psychokinetic energy field would begin identifying the ectoplasmic 'body' as his real one." He stopped and swallowed, his eyes lowered.

"And then he might never be able to return to his flesh-and-blood body?" asked Winston.

"Exactly." The physicist glanced downward at the meter. "He'd essentially become a Class Four full-roaming, non-repeating phantasm, despite not having technically died."

"What would happen to his real body?" Janine asked.

"I don't have enough data to determine for sure," Egon admitted, "but the most likely probability is that it would remain in a coma indefinitely. It's possible that when his ectoplasmic form became strong enough, the remaining electrometabolic energy would transfer to it, and his body would cease functioning at all."

"Oh, no," Ray moaned. He'd been afraid that his remaining outside his body for too long might well have that effect eventually, ectoplasm or not.

"Right. So the Spud stays as far away from the hospital as possible, along with any other goopers." Peter's features had hardened at the idea of Ray in a perpetual coma. He rubbed his hands together. "All right, since you brought this thing up here, we'll go ahead and try it out - but not out here in public. Think we can sneak back into his room?"

"I think the nurses at the desk have given up on stopping us," Winston noted.

"All right. Try not to wake anyone else up." Peter led the four of them back down the hallway; the nurses on duty glared at them, but, true to Winston's guess, none of them wanted to be the one to interfere. The only table in the cramped room was the tray table beside the bed, which was too high, so they settled cross-legged on the floor. Janine pulled the letterboard and planchette out of the box, and set them in the center of their impromptu circle.

"You probably ought to do a quick banishing before you start," Ray began to explain, and then stopped. They still couldn't hear him, and anyway, if some other spirit came around to try and impersonate him, he was there to chase it off. Most ghosts in a hospital were likely to be Class Threes, the spirit-echoes of people who had died before they were ready and had unfinished business. Egon hadn't detected any on the PKE meter yet, and while anything that looked like a seance would probably act as a beacon for whatever spirits might be in the area, Ray thought it was unlikely that they'd be able to fool Peter. He looked at the board. He didn't see or feel any residual energy - if Janine's sister's roommate's experiments had left any bad vibes, they'd long since worn off.

"We might as well follow protocol. Dammit, my mother didn't raise me to be a medium," Peter grumbled, laying a finger on the pointer.

Egon reached a long, thin digit out to join his. "Just imagine what Charlie would have done if he'd know about your 'talents' back in your carnival days."

"Oh, let's not even think about that." Peter rubbed at this forehead with his other hand. "He knew I was good at cold-reading people, and he used that to his benefit every chance he got. If he had any inkling that I might have an unfair advantage . . . "

Janine's fingernail clicked on the planchette, opposite from Egon's. "Unfair? Whaddaya mean 'unfair,' Dr. V.?"

The psychologist sighed. "You know what I mean, Janine. Any psi, even weak and unpredictable psi, is more than the common rubes have. Using it at all is like cheating, especially if they don't know about it."

"Most of 'em wouldn't believe you if you told them." Their secretary looked across at him thoughtfully. "And is it really that much more of an advantage than just being smarter than them? You wouldn't flinch at using your brains to your own advantage, would you?" Peter blinked at her, his face half-blank.

Winston added his finger to the three on the pointer. "I don't think the big worry is whether it's fair or not. We all start from different places in life, anyway, and what happens to us all after that surely isn't fair. What you need to worry about is whether you're treating other people right, using whatever your gifts are to help them or hurt them. That's the difference between you and Charlie, Pete - he uses whatever advantage he has to _take_ advantage, while you aren't out to hurt anyone. At least, not most of the time." He grinned a bit.

Peter shifted his jaw and looked thoughtful for a minute. "I'll have to think about that. Anyway, if being 'gifted' means we get to put Ray back where he belongs, I guess I can't gripe." He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Egon and Janine locked gazes for a second, then both did the same. They quickly fell into Peter's rhythm, the three of them all breathing slowly in unison. Winston kept his eyes open, darting alertly around the room, watching for any sign of trouble.

Ray leaned down between Janine and Peter and put his hand flat on the planchette. Somehow, it _did_ feel more solid than anything else he'd put his hands through so far, but pushing at it didn't do anything.

Peter's eyes cracked open, a tiny sliver visible beneath his dark lashes. He whispered "Ray, are you there?"

"Yes, I'm right here, Peter," Ray responded. The pointer began to slide, stopping at YES. Janine blinked her eyes open as it started to move, startled; Egon waited until it stopped, his lids still heavy, like Peter's.

Winston's forehead wrinkled. "Maybe one of us should be writing this down." He took his finger off the planchette and hunted for the miniature notebook he kept in his jumpsuit pocket.

"We should make some attempt to verify that we are, in fact, speaking with Ray, and not just our own subconscious ideas of what he would say," murmured Egon.

Winston nodded, stood up, and walked around the room to the other side. "I'm not looking at the board so I won't cue you guys. Ray, what was the last thing we did on Ecto before we left on our first bust this morning?"

"We checked the wires on the spark plugs, since we thought she might have been misfiring," answered Ray. The planchette started moving.

"S-P-A-R-K-P-L-U-G-W-I-R-E-S," Janine read off, carefully not looking at Winston.

"You got it. That's Ray all right." Winston walked back and sat down again, paper and pen in hand.

"Ray, could you maybe pause for spaces between words?" Janine asked into the empty air.

"Ask Peter, not me," Ray protested. The pointer drifted to Peter's side of the board and stayed there.

"Have you tried re-entering your body, Ray?" Egon asked, gently.

"Yes, but it didn't work. It felt just like everything else - I passed right through it. I told you that before." Ray waited for the planchette to spell that out. It took a long time.

"Remember, Ray, Peter was the only one who could hear you. There's no sensation at all when you approach your body?"

"Nothing." The plastic triangle found NO.

"Can you see your silver cord?" Egon had lifted his head slightly, his eyes still at half-mast; he was looking in Ray's general direction.

Ray shook his head, then remembered that he had to speak for Peter. "No, I can't. I never saw it at all." The planchette pointed to NO again, and then spelled out the last sentence.

Egon frowned. Speaking very softly, so as not to rouse him out of his trance, he leaned in towards Peter and asked "How much of a problem is not having the cord visible?"

Peter's voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. "Not seeing it isn't an issue; not everyone reports it as a component of the out-of-body experience. But not being able to feel any connection with his body at all is a big problem."

"I was afraid you were going to say that," sighed Winston, and Janine glanced at him, gnawing at her lower lip.

Egon gazed into the middle distance, then asked "How are you feeling, Ray?"

Ray said "I'm fine," then realized that Peter wouldn't believe that. He hugged himself, then continued, "I mean, I'm not cold or in pain or anything." The planchette started moving. N-O-T-H-U-R-T. "I was excited at first, I mean, we tried this for what, a couple of months? And we never got anywhere. But now - I want to be back in my body, and I'm kind of scared that I can't. And I was afraid you guys were going to bust me back when you thought I was a Class Four. But I know you wouldn't hurt me." E-X-C-I-T-E-D-K-I-N-D-O-F-S-C-A-R-E-D-O-K-N-O-W. "This isn't working so well, is it?"

"It's better than me having to change consciousness completely to pass a message back to Egon," Peter murmured in that sleepy, faraway voice.

"Yeah, I guess that's true," Ray answered.

"No private conversations, guys," Janine chided.

Egon shook his head. "Actually, if Ray wants to speak to Peter directly, that's fine. However will best get the information across."

Peter's head came up suddenly; his eyes snapped open. "Hey, Egon, what could keep Ray from being able to reconnect with his body? You got anything on that?"

"A few hypotheses. Nothing I might even call a theory yet." Egon shook his head slowly. "Do you?"

"No," Peter said thoughtfully, drawing a finger across his chin, "but I might have read something about it once. Ray," he turned, addressing the air in Ray's approximate direction, "I think Egon and I need to hit the books. Now that we know you're okay, would you mind if we went back to the firehouse to catch a nap and then do a little research?"

"Not at all, but could you turn on the TV before you leave? I'll get bored here by myself," Ray answered.

The planchette spelled out O-K-T-V.

Janine burst out laughing. "Sure thing, Ray." She switched on the set, turned the volume down low, and flipped channels until she found a cheesy old black-and-white science fiction film. "That look good enough?"

"It'll do," Ray answered, grinning. He watched Janine pack the Ouija board back in its box and stash it under the bed, then settled back to watch the film as they left, whispering their good-byes to the air around him.

\---

Ray rolled over in midair. He was bored silly. The movie had been fine, but it had been followed by an infomercial, and then the nurse had shut if off when she checked on his body - no, on him - at the shift change. He'd wandered into some of the neighboring rooms to watch their televisions instead, but he'd felt like he was intruding, and by this time in the morning all that was on was soap operas.

"It wouldn't be so bad," he said to the ceiling, "if I could sleep." His body _was_ sleeping, more or less, but his astral form didn't seem to need rest.

He debated trying to make his way back to the firehouse. He was pretty sure he could do it. It wasn't as if Ecto hadn't travelled between the firehouse and the hospital often enough with him in it. He'd driven the route a few times, usually when it was Winston who was hurt, but once when it had been Peter, and Winston had been in the back trying to stop the bleeding. Ray remembered the fangs on that Class Five and shuddered. All things considered, he'd gotten off easy.

He was drifting slowly in the direction of the window when Peter flew through it and almost collided with him. "Whoops!" Peter veered left, Ray went right, and they managed not to crash.

Ray recovered a second later. "Peter? How are you - wait, you're not -" He broke off. Peter did a barrel roll and flipped around to face Ray correctly, smirking as if he were very, very pleased with himself. A faint silver cord trailed from the psychologist's solar plexus, fading off into invisibility before it passed through the wall. "You did it! You figured out how to have a voluntary OOBE!"

"Yeah. Well, we all took a nap first. And Egon did a lot of the figuring-out part. My body's wearing one of his gizmos right now, although I got out once without it." He flinched a bit. "Fell right back in once I realized it, though. Stupid mistake. Once Egon had the readings for that, he put it all together and understood how this worked." Peter smirked again, broader this time. "He couldn't do it even with the gizmo, though. Neither could Winston, although he felt like it was _about_ to work a couple of times. Janine wanted to try, I think she could probably do it, but she kept falling asleep every time she lay down. She got even less sleep than we did last night; I can't really blame her."

"She was brilliant. The Ouija board idea worked out great." Ray grinned. "So what next?"

"Well, the next thing I was going to do was try to push you back into your body like this." Peter shot him a sheepish look. "It's not a really complex plan, I admit, but we couldn't figure out a reason why it wouldn't work."

"Well, okay, you can try." Ray arranged himself right over his body, lining up as close as he could. Peter drifted over him and gently pushed down on Ray's chest. He sank backwards through his body and ended up underneath the bed. "Nope," he called back, "no dice."

"Well, it was worth a try, anyway." Peter levitated over to the chair and hovered about a foot above it.

Ray rolled over and back to vertical, joining Peter by the chair. "So, is there a Plan B?"

"Yeah," Peter said, inclining his head slightly in that way that meant he was slightly embarrassed by what he had to say. "But it involves Egon prowling through your section of the team library looking for an occult solution. We've pretty much exhausted my end."

"Oh." Ray glanced back at his body on the bed, still breathing peacefully. "So, I guess you'll be heading back to help?"

Something flickered across Peter's features, disembodied through they were. "Um, do you want me to leave?"

"No!" Ray wasn't sure what he was doing that counted as speaking - it wasn't pushing air - but whatever it was, he was doing it so forcefully it was shifting his position. He made himself stop spinning and faced Peter again. "No, I really don't want to be alone, but -"

Peter held up one translucent hand and stopped him. "Then you won't be. Simple as that."

"But Egon -" Ray started again.

"Has Janine and Winston to help him out, and trust me, Ray, when it comes to your specialty, Janine's more help than I am." Peter smirked. "I mean, I can read English, French, and a little bit of high-school level Latin. Janine can at least handle Hebrew."

Ray calmed down a bit, settling closer to the floor. "Yeah, and Kabalah is more likely to be helpful than alchemy, for this." He frowned at Peter. "But at least there'd be three pairs of eyes helping Egon out, not just two."

Peter looked hurt. "Ray, there'd be two pairs of eyes, regardless. One of us would be here to watch you, no matter what." He pointed at the body on the bed. "I mean, I realize you may not have noticed, since the you who does the noticing is still in your uniform, but you're in the hospital, Ray." One corner of his mouth curled into a grin. "And we figured that I'd get the most out of observing and documenting this phenomenon. That, and I won the coin flip with Winston."

"Won?" Ray grinned back, then looked down at his astral form. Peter was right; he was projecting an image of his uniform, not just his body. That was one of the reasons he hadn't noticed right away, he remembered. "Huh. That's weird."

"Yeah, Ray. Won. And it's not that strange." Peter glanced down at himself. "Monroe theorized that the astral body would manifest various barriers to delineate psychological boundaries. Clothing would be one obvious way of symbolizing that." He paused as he tugged at a cuff, then continued, "Although I'm a little surprised that it's specifically the jumpsuit, at least in my case. For you, it makes perfect sense. You're more you in that thing than in anything else I've seen you wear."

"So for Egon, do you think it would be the jumpsuit, the lab coat, or the formal suit with tails?" Ray asked. He was intrigued - astral projection was one area where his and Peter's specialties overlapped significantly, anyway. He was vaguely annoyed with himself for not having brought it up since finishing his dissertation.

"The jumpsuit, possibly with the lab coat over it," Peter decided. "Having his soul forcibly removed from his body isn't exactly the same thing as an astral projection, but I think it counts as an out-of-body experience in a general sense, and when that happened, he still had the uniform."

"I wonder if we're wearing anything underneath," mused Ray. He tried to tug down the zipper to check, but it didn't move.

Peter shook his head slowly. "I don't think it quite works like that," he said, drifting closer. "If it's a visual manifestation of psychological ego barriers, you wouldn't be able to take it off - you'd have to lower those barriers, and then the manifestation would disappear."

"I guess you're right." Ray looked at Peter, weightless and slightly translucent. "Why haven't we experimented with this before? I mean, this surprised me when it happened, but it's a reasonable thing to expect eventually, in our line of work."

Peter looked uncomfortable. "We did, back in college, remember?"

"Yeah, but that was a long time ago." Ray thought for a moment. "And you're the one who decided we needed to stop." They'd been trying to induce an OOBE off and on for a couple of months, sometimes singly, sometimes together. Then one night they all fell asleep in the middle of Egon's living room making the attempt, and when they'd woken up, Peter had stated very emphatically that he didn't want to continue, that this was giving him nightmares. Ray turned back to him. "What happened? Egon and I always figured you had one of your precog dreams and blamed it on the OOBE experiment."

"Not exactly." Peter's chest rose and fell as if he were taking a deep breath, even though they didn't need to breathe. "It . . . sort of worked. At least, I think I got out for a moment. I remember looking down at my own body."

"But that's great! That's what we wanted! Why didn't you tell us?" Ray's expression cycled from surprise through elation to hurt.

"I was . . . I could see something, your auras, your PKE fields, your _chi_, I'm not sure what it was, on you and Egon. Um, not on. In. Around. Crud, I don't think English has the right preposition."

Ray thought he understood; he'd seen something like that around Janine, and then later around Peter and Egon, when they'd been trying to contact him. "Go on, I'm listening."

"It was . . . " Peter trailed off; he looked embarrassed. "I wanted it, wanted to touch it, to - to dive _into_ one of you, both of you, and - I don't know." He pivoted away, drifting a bit. "You were gorgeous, both of you, the energy from both of you, and I was - 'turned on' is the only way I can think to describe it, but that's not quite right. It was erotic, but it wasn't physical." Peter looked at his hands, then risked a glance back at Ray. "I'm describing it really badly. I didn't understand it, and I still don't, really. But it scared me."

"So you asked us to stop so it wouldn't happen again?" Ray was still a little confused.

"And so - wow, this sounds really stupid now - so the same thing wouldn't happen to one of the two of you without me." Peter was back to looking at, or possibly through, his hands. "I guess I was jealous - if I wasn't going to get to have that, then I didn't want either of you two to have it, either."

Ray looked at Peter sideways. "That doesn't make any sense."

"It doesn't make any sense to you, Ray, because you don't have a jealous bone in your body." Peter stopped himself, and snickered. "Or out of it, apparently. Me, I'm well acquainted with the green-eyed monster, and I don't mean the one in the mirror."

"Don't talk like that." Peter's self-deprecation was almost as bad as his compulsive bragging. Sometimes they were the same thing. Ray nodded slowly. "But you don't see that around my body now, do you?"

"No, it's all over there where you are." Peter was suddenly somber again. "I mean, not as bright as it was then; I suspect you're using a lot of that energy to project your astral form. But I can still see it."

"Oh." Ray's voice dropped to a murmur. "I could see it, a little bit, around you and Janine earlier, and maybe Egon, when you were trying to reach out to me. I don't think I can see it now, though."

Peter looked back up at him, a weak grin on his face, and did something with his shoulders, as if he were trying to loosen them. That didn't make any sense, did it? An astral body didn't have muscles to get tight.

A flicker of green light appeared at the back of Peter's neck, and spread, like an aurora. Peter glanced back. "That better?"

"Yeah, I can see it now." It was - well, _pretty_ didn't seem like the right word to apply to anything having to do with Peter, but it was the best Ray could come up with. "What did you do?"

"Relaxed my grip on it." Peter twisted around to try to look, and ended up pivoting through the chair. "I think. It's kind of hard to explain."

"Wow." It was mostly green, but other colors rippled through it iridescently - violet and blue, and hints of red and orange. Something dipped and twisted about where Ray's solar plexus should have been. "What does - what do I look like?"

"Ray, do you really want me to look that closely?" There was a hint of a whine in Peter's voice.

"Well, yeah." Ray was puzzled. "Why not?"

Peter allowed himself a small chuckle. "Ray, you're such an innocent - what did I say earlier?"

"That you found it attractive, before." Ray tucked up his knees. "Am I ugly now? Have I changed that much?"

Peter opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. Something flickered in his eyes, deep and uncertain. A ripple of dark blue rolled through his aura. Finally, he managed to mumble, "No, but that's not the point."

"You haven't changed, I know." Ray unfolded again. "Peter, you're gorgeous. I mean, you know that already, you wouldn't chase girls the way you do if you didn't. Physically, you're handsome, that's a given."

"You telling me you've been looking?" Peter's eyebrows arched, both at once. Azure light sparked around his head.

"I've been looking since I first saw you, Peter." Ray tilted his head lightly. "You never noticed?"

"No, actually." Peter looked abashed, and his aura got redder. "I guess - I mean, you're always so excited about everything - "

"I'm excited about everything around you and Egon, and now Winston and Janine, because I love you guys," Ray said, slowing down a bit for emphasis. "Ask Aunt Lois what I was like between when my parents died and when I met you guys."

"She's said we're good for you, but I always figured it was because we kept you out of too much trouble." Peter straightened up, trailing his feet through the floor for a moment. The green light pouring around him rippled and flashed. "So, is this straight-up kin-love we're talking about, or - "

Ray shrugged. "If that's what you want it to be, Peter, that's what it is. If you need a brother, then that's what I am for you."

Peter drifted a little closer. "What are my other options?"

Ray gathered his courage. "If you won't describe me, Peter, then I'll start." He paused, taking in as much of that verdant aurora as he could. "You, your energy, you're green, like a tree in late spring before the dust of summer settles on it. You're full of motes in almost every color of the rainbow, not much yellow but everything else is there." He paused. "Lots of blue and violet, in patterns that look almost like sigils. Mathematical and chaotic at the same time. Moving, almost hypnotic. And the way the light spreads around your shoulders - it's almost like you have wings and a halo." He grinned. "Never thought I'd see you look this angelic." Sobering, his voice dropped a few notes. "You're beautiful, Peter. You, I, if this is your soul I'm seeing, you're someone even more wonderful than I knew. I've wanted to make love to you before, Peter - " he glanced away, to avoid Peter's eyes at that confession - "but right now, I'd settle for worshipping you."

His friend's voice, when it came after a silence, was warm and soft. "I wouldn't have guessed those were really different things for you, Ray."

"The first one's a subset of the second." Ray looked back. Peter's eyes were open and warm, and he wore a smile that was almost shy. That was an odd expression on their most outgoing partner.

Peter clasped his hands together and nodded. "Okay. You're gold, Ray, like dawn sunlight, with a lot of orange and sky blue mixed in; it looks a lot like flames, but it's moving much slower, like water. Some purple and green, too, and a core of rose-red, right around your chest. There are a lot of swirls, places where two colors aren't overlapping but sort of dissolving into each other and then reforming. It all - you look so _alive_, Ray, so vibrant, there's just so much energy and I want to _touch_ it. I can't even explain why." One hand started to reach for Ray, and then stopped again. "You've got wings, too, but they're around your arms, and there's a sort of peak to your halo - you look like a firebird, a phoenix maybe."

Ray smiled. "Thank you." He thought for a moment. "When you saw it before, was Egon's aura blue?"

"Yeah." Peter shifted uncomfortably. "I couldn't see it in nearly as much detail as I can see yours. I guess the bodies get in the way."

"I'd kind of like to see him this way, too." Ray was amused by his own curiosity.

"So would I," Peter admitted. He let himself look at Ray directly; Ray could see flickers of gold and searing blue reflected in Peter's eyes. Was that from him? Did reflections even work the same in astral space? Ray wasn't sure. Not for the first time, he wished he could write down his notes on this experience.

Peter licked his lips. "Um, so, when you said that part about lovemaking earlier - was that an offer?"

Ray blinked. "I thought you weren't into guys."

"Look who's talking," Peter said, his tone half-playful and half-accusing.

Ray spread his hands. "I never said anything like that! I can't help what you assumed."

"Back at you." Peter's grin was wicked. "While if I'm doing the chasing, I generally prefer women, I don't much care who's chasing me."

"I'm not very good at chasing," Ray mumbled.

"And that would be why I never noticed." Peter was drifting closer again, his eyes full of reflected light. "I'm noticing now, though."

"Peter, are you sure? I mean, you're not being - I don't know, hypnotized, or just not in your usual - " Ray broke off, his gaze riveted to Peter's eyes. "You wouldn't normally offer me - this."

Peter nodded. "Part of it is that I'm not sure what it is I'm offering. I mean, we sort of have bodies here, but they're not real." One hand reached out, and didn't flinch back this time. "And we may not ever have another opportunity. I'm really curious, and I'm drawn to you like a moth to a flame like this, and it sounds like you're open to the idea." He stopped, and his lip trembled. The next word was very small: "Please?"

"Of course, Peter!" Ray spread his arms and drifted towards Peter. He glanced down; the uniform was dissolving into the red-gold light - ah, now he could see it around himself.

Peter frowned. "I'm not sure I can do that." He hesitated in midair, hand still out.

"Sure you can." Ray smiled, beaming like the sun - perhaps less metaphorically than usual. He was close enough to take Peter's hand now, and did.

Immediately he heard a low murmur - _what if this doesn't work, what if he doesn't like it, what if we both like it too much, I don't care I need this, I need him, so much_ -

Peter's voice, no, Peter's thoughts. He felt Peter go through the same realization; he must be hearing Ray's thoughts, too. Ray relaxed, and tried to send _it's all right, whatever happens is all right_ through their connection.

Peter shifted, and his uniform began to blur and fade, absorbed in the green light. _I trust you, Ray._ His face pulled into a smirk. _Be gentle with me, okay? It's been a long time since I was a virgin at much of anything._

_Okay,_ Ray sent back, and reached out with his other hand, taking Peter's carefully. Feelings began to trickle in alongside the thoughts. A tickle of fear, a dribble of embarrassment, a bubble of amusement -

A tidal wave of _longing_, of yearning, of spine-prickling desire.

Ray let it wash over him, and opened up his heart, letting his own want and need for Peter pour out of him. The rose-red light around him surged and flared, and Peter shuddered. _Closer, Ray._

Ray pulled him nearer, slid his hands up Peter's arms, two columns of pulsing light, sunlight on new grass. He folded Peter into an embrace, and felt Peter's arms around him. Memories flickered through him -

_An apartment without enough furniture, only one bookshelf_

_The rough wood of a fencepost, leaning crazily, and the warm breath of a horse_

_Charlie, much younger than he'd ever seen him but with that same empty smile, holding out a toy car_

_His father, showing him how to change a spark plug and explaining how it worked_

_Snatching a football out of the air with the tips of his fingers, crashing to the turf under two bruisers as the crowd roared_

_His parents' funeral, heavy with the smells of lilies and mothballs_

_Meeting Egon for the first time, in a lecture hall for two hundred students_

_Meeting Egon for the first time, as Peter introduced them_

Peter's consciousness fluttered into Ray. _I've known you for fourteen years - have I ever understood you?_

_As much as any two people in separate bodies can understand,_ Ray toned back.

Peter vibrated with need and melted into Ray, green light melding into the gold. Ray hummed and let his edges go, full of the essence that was Peter, rose light and green flaring into blinding white.

For one single, flawless instant, there was a single soul, filled to overflowing.

It was _good_. They rang with the sheer joy of it, like a struck bell.

Then the pleasure of it overwhelmed them, and there were two of them again, spinning in infinity, overlapping and together, inside each other in an impossible intimacy.

It was over too quickly; Ray was back in his own mind, buzzing and flaring with everything he'd felt and sensed. His body was somewhere below him; he was vaguely sorry it had missed out.

Peter made a noise somewhere between a post-orgasmic moan and a sob. "Wow. That was . . . intense." He rolled over and faced Ray again; tendrils in the green light began knitting back into the phantasmal uniform.

"Yeah," Ray breathed. He glanced down and began re-weaving his own, with effort. "Um . . . was it good for you?"

Peter doubled over, giggling. "Oh, man, Ray, where did you pick up that line from?"

"You, back in college." Ray stifled his own laughter.

"Okay, I need to teach you some new cheap lines." Peter stopped shaking and faced Ray again. "But yeah, that was really, really good."

"For me, too." Ray was about to say something else, but he wasn't sure what; he was interrupted by footsteps approaching the room. Egon pushed open the door, a grocery bag in each arm. Peter darted into the corner, away from Ray, as if he'd been caught doing something naughty.

Egon glanced around, shut the door quietly behind him, set both bags in the chair, strode to the window, and made sure the blinds were closed. Very softly, almost under his breath, he murmured, "Ray, if you are present, please touch my right hand."

Ray sailed around Egon and laid his ethereal hand on top of Egon's solid one. Egon nodded. "And Peter, if you are here, please touch my left hand." Peter crept from the corner and did so; Egon nodded again. "Very good," he whispered, and began unpacking the bags.

Some of the objects were the sorts of things Ray would have expected; a modified PKE meter, a headband with a chicken-wire cap and a lot of attached electrodes, a couple of different power supplies. Some of them belonged more to Ray's specialty than Egon's; there was a black-handled knife, a box of salt, a bundle of herbs, a bottle of Florida water, and several candles. And a few were just puzzling - a travel bottle of shampoo, a large plastic bowl, an onion, and a potato.

Egon strode over to the sink and filled the bowl with water, testing the temperature on his wrist. "Ray, we think we may have an idea why you've had difficulty re-entering your body. Winston and I realized - when the Class Five knocked you out of it, it also coated you quite thoroughly in ectoplasm. We tested some of the ectoplasm from your uniform, and I believe that its residuals were high enough to interfere with your PKE valences re-synchronizing with the purely physical aspect of your electrometabolic biorhythms. " He shut off the faucet and walked back to the tray table, setting the bowl down and reaching for the lever that raised and lowered the head of the bed. "While most of the ectoplasm was removed by the hospital staff, there are still significant traces in your hair. I am going to remove those."

Very carefully, he lifted Ray's lolling head, slid the bowl beneath it, and began gently rinsing the ectoplasm from Ray's short auburn fuzz. Still supporting Ray's neck with one arm, he flipped open the shampoo bottle with the other, squeezed it, and cautiously worked up a lather. Ray watched the whole process from inches away; there was something fascinating, and actually kind of touching, about the careful motions of Egon's fingers against his skin, even if he couldn't feel it. Peter observed from the other side of the room, an unreadable expression on his face.

Egon rinsed the froth from Ray's hair, his fingers softly massaging Ray's scalp, then carefully exchanged the bowl for a towel. Balancing the bowl on the edge of the sink, he unhooked his usual meter from his belt and pointed it at the sudsy water; it twitched its antennae and burbled. Egon nodded once, and poured the water down the drain, running the faucet for a count of ten - to dilute it, Ray guessed. Egon returned to the bedside and turned the new meter on; it flickered to life, antennae fluttering. Two entities appeared on the screen, both Class Fours at the top of the class. Ray was pretty sure those were him and Peter.

"All right," Egon sighed, "the next part of this is more your area of expertise than mine, Ray - you'll have to forgive me if it's not entirely up to your standards." He picked up the bottle of Florida water. "If I'm doing something wrong, grab my left wrist and hold it." He poured a dribble into his hands, rubbed them together briefly, then flicked the droplets across his own face and chest; pausing for a moment to clean his glasses, he tugged the blanket away from Ray's body's chest, folded it neatly at his feet, and repeated the procedure on his prone form.

"Ritual cleansing?" Peter whispered. Ray nodded. Egon fished a small glass bowl from the bottom of one of the bags, filled it with water, and sprinkled salt into it. "And that's for the room," Ray added, as Egon dipped the bundle of rosemary into the bowl and sprinkled salt water around the perimeter of the tiny space.

Peter shivered. Ray glanced at him, then at Egon; yup, Egon's aura was a glacial ice blue - he could see it now. "You're feeling that," Ray guessed.

"Yeah." Peter rubbed his astral hands together. "It feels colder in here than it did."

Egon glanced around. "I hope this is a small enough amount not to set off the fire alarm." He picked up a twig of dried sage and flicked the lighter; a curl of smoke drifted from it.

"Nah, that's no more than a doctor on a cig break would -" Ray broke off. "Peter, are you okay?" Venkman looked like he was in a heavy wind, about to blow away; he clutched at the rail of the hospital cot.

"I don't - something's pushing me - " Peter flailed; Ray caught him by one hand and grabbed Egon's left wrist with the other. Ray yelled in Egon's ear, "Stop it, you're banishing Peter!"

It took Egon a second to notice Ray's cold touch, but he doused the sage immediately. "My apologies. We'll just use the candles instead."

"Stay inside the circle," Ray warned Peter as Egon set a votive in each corner of the room.

"As long as I have a choice," Peter said, shaking his head. "Egon may not do this much, but it's a doozy when he does."

"No, you're right, but honestly I think most of that was the sage." Ray gave Peter a lopsided grin. "After all, it's supposed to banish evil spirits."

"Har-de-har," grumbled Peter, and for a moment he genuinely looked troubled.

"I was joking, Peter; I don't think - " Ray was interrupted by Egon setting down the lighter and picking up the knife in a broad, swooping gesture as he turned to face the first candle. "Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East," he boomed, before remembering where he was and lowering his voice, "Elementals of Air, I do summon, stir, and call you up to guard this circle and witness this rite. So mote it be." He carved a pentagram in the air with quick, precise strokes.

A bright yellow shimmer appeared in the air in front of him, and folded slightly, as if it were bowing. Peter yelped; Ray grinned from ear to ear.

"Is that the elemental Egon was just talking about?" Peter whispered frantically.

"I think so. It's the right color." Ray glanced at Egon. "Wow, for someone who doesn't do this very often, Spengs is _good_."

"I didn't know he did this at all." Peter shank back towards the bed as Egon chanted the invocation for the South. "How do we know they won't decide to eat us or something?"

"They're just elemental guardians," Ray assured him as Egon called up the western watchtower. "They won't cross into the circle, and even if they did, they're not aggressive." They looked a lot like candle flames, round-edged lozenges of energy. Ray wondered if that was how they always looked, or if that was just how Egon visualized them; he'd always thought of them as little golems molded out of the appropriate element.

Egon called forth the northern guardian and carefully walked back to the first candle. "This circle is cast; we stand between worlds." He set the knife down, and turned back to the bed. "Of course, you're already there, aren't you?" He sounded almost wistful.

Ray smirked at Peter. "We'll have to help him do this, later. He's going to think he's really missed out if we don't."

Peter looked hopeful, then vaguely disappointed, then just frowned, but all he said was "He spends too little time thinking about his body as it is."

Egon gently hefted the chicken-wire cap. "Peter, this is similar to the headband your body is wearing, but the polarity is reversed. I would suggest you not touch it, as it will probably snap you back to your body if you do."

"Roger that," Peter replied, backing away from it slightly.

Egon lifted Ray's body's head slightly and settled the electronic tiara on his damp hair. "It should provide enough of a psychokinetic tug to counterbalance the missing silver cord."

He turned back to the table and picked up the potato and the onion. "I just want to say," he mumbled, settling one into each of Ray's open hands, "that this part was Janine's idea, not mine."

"And it was a good one, too," Ray replied as he realized. "Root vegetables are inherently grounding."

"Because of the connection with the earth, I take it?" Peter asked. He rolled his eyes as Ray nodded. "You mages are astonishingly literal sometimes."

"Hey, if it works, don't knock it." Ray eased himself back into position over his body as Egon ran a power cable from the makeshift crown to a small battery pack.

"When I flip the switch, Ray, please attempt to re-enter your body again." Egon fiddled with the connection and then turned to face the bed. "If this doesn't work, we'll send Peter back to the firehouse to give his report and go from there."

"Good luck," Peter said, crossing his translucent fingers.

A _click_ came from under Egon's fingertips, and suddenly Ray felt like he was on a giant vibrating bed. He must have cried out, because Peter was suddenly at his side. "Are you okay? Do I need to get the big guy to shut it off?"

"N-n-noo," Ray said, as something grabbed at his arms and slid away again. "Peter, w-why d-d-on't you tr-ry pushing ag-gain?"

"If you say so." Peter arched over and knelt on his chest, hands flat on his shoulders, and Ray could feel _something_ plucking at him. He closed his hands, and felt the living flesh of the potato and the onion pushing back.

"Come on, come on, Ray," Egon whispered, eyes huge behind his glasses.

"I'm trying," Ray huffed back, and pressed himself against his body.

One hand twitched. Egon jumped, then grabbed Ray's left hand, folding it around the tuber. "That's it, Ray, that's great, keep going!" he shouted, forgetting himself again.

Ray could feel Egon's hand, warm against his - faintly, but he could feel it. "I think it's working, guys!" he said, and it seemed like he could feel his tongue move.

"You got it, Ray, keep it up!" Peter was practically jumping on him, grinning like a madman.

There was a sudden rush of blood in his ears, and Ray felt like he was falling. Faintly, he heard Peter calling, "We did it, guys, I'll see you back home!" Then his nose was filled with bergamot and hospital disinfectant, and the green and blue lights were gone.

Ray took a deep breath. Smell. He hadn't been able to smell anything when he was out of body. He squeezed the onion and felt its skin crackle; Egon was still clinging to the other hand. His feet were cold and his hair was wet. Slowly, Ray opened his eyes.

For an instant, he thought he saw the electric blue around Egon's shoulders before his vision faded back to normal. Egon let out the breath he'd been holding. "Ray, are you all right?" he pleaded.

"I think so." Ray handed the stew vegetables back to Egon and carefully pushed himself up. He wiggled his toes, tested his ankles and knees, and rolled his head in both directions. Everything worked the way he remembered. "Um, other than the catheter, I feel fine."

Egon crushed him to his chest in a hug with a sigh of relief. "I'll get the nurse to take care of that."

"Wait!" Ray stopped him as he was about to head for the door. "Take the circle down first."

"Oops." Egon blushed, and fumbled for the knife.

"Not only would the guardians be annoyed," Ray said, teasing, "but I suspect the nurse would blow a gasket at the candles."

"No, no, you're quite right," Egon admitted, He turned towards the north corner of the room as Ray began repacking the two bags.

\---

Winston, Janine, and Slimer were standing at the reception desk as Ray and Egon pulled in. Egon had insisted on driving, despite Ray's protestations that he felt fine, so the trip had taken almost twice as long as it needed to, but Ray's mild frustration drained away completely as he climbed out to the sounds of cheering. He didn't even mind too much when Slimer dove in for the big hug - it wasn't like this uniform wasn't already crackling with dried ectoplasm from Moonface.

Janine hugged him hard, carefully avoiding the large green splotch Slimer had left, and then tackled Egon. "You did it! You got Ray back! You're _brilliant_."

"Well, yes," Egon acknowledged, adjusting his glasses. "But as Ray tells it, Peter was absolutely necessary to the process as well. Where is he, by the way? Did he not wake up?" He looked faintly worried.

"He's up," Winston answered, pounding Ray on the back perhaps a little harder than necessary. "He said being out of body made him hungry. He's in the kitchen."

Egon nodded. "Ray, you probably ought to get out of that uniform and shower, just to make sure all traces of the PKE-blocking ectoplasm are removed from your skin."

"Sounds good," Ray agreed, and leaned down to tug off his boots. Egon retrieved the bags from the back seat and headed downstairs to put the tools back in in their correct places.

Winston glanced at Egon and then leaned heavily against Ecto. "You okay, man? You had us worried there for a while."

"I was worried until Janine finally heard me," Ray admitted. "I was afraid you guys were going to bust me before you figured out it was me."

"Would the traps work on something that wasn't ectoplasmic?" Winston didn't always trust his instincts about the equipment, even though he understood them well enough now to repair a pack from spare parts.

"The traps would. The throwers probably wouldn't, but I wouldn't want to be the test subject." Ray looked towards the stairs. Something buzzed in his chest. "Is Peter okay?"

"I think so." Winston raised an eyebrow. "I'm guessing it was a wilder experience for him than he's letting on?"

"I think it may have rattled his worldview a little bit." Ray rubbed at the back of his neck. "He's the most psychically aware of all of us, and yet he tries to be the skeptic."

"He probably just needs some time to process everything, then." Winston smiled slowly. "It's worked for me every time this job has blown my horizons wide open."

Ray blinked. "Wow. Yeah. Uh, thanks for understanding, Winston." His cheeks pinked slightly. "I, um, I forget sometimes -"

"That I was a mundane before you handed me that trap?" Winston shook his head and clucked his tongue. "I don't regret any of it, Ray, but this job has been one long learning experience."

"Tell me about it," agreed Janine from her desk. "I mean, I always kind of believed in ESP, and my aunt Naomi reads a little Tarot once in a while, but this?" She waved at the spare packs charging against the wall, then at Slimer. "Never in a million years would I have expected this."

Ray squeezed Winston's shoulder, then ambled over and took Janine's hand. "I know. I just - I forget, because for me, it's all right there. This is the way the world's _supposed_ to work. And for Egon, too. I guess we've just been working together so long, we forget how strange it can be for anyone who doesn't share our assumptions." He took a deep breath. "I'm going to go get cleaned up, like Egon said, and then I think I better check in on Peter."

"Try to get to him before Egon does," Janine murmured. "He'll want a full debriefing, and I don't think Dr. V.'s ready yet."

Ray rolled his bottom lip under his teeth and nodded.

\---

Peter looked up and flashed him the fake PR smile before Ray could say anything. "Hungry? I can imagine - you missed dinner and breakfast both."

"A little." Ray wandered over the the cabinet. "I was kind of thinking about making hash browns."

Peter snorted. "Need all the grounding you can get, huh?"

"Something like that." Ray found the box grater and a cutting board, and tried to remember if he needed to peel the potatoes first. "Egon wants me to look at his OOBE-inducer, see if I can refine the design any."

"Seemed to work fine as it is, for me." Peter's eyes were curious, but he was avoiding looking at Ray directly.

"I told him that. I mean, I don't mind looking it over - Egon still uses half again as much solder as he needs to make a connection - but the evidence we have is that it works, at least on moderately psychically aware individuals." Ray washed two big baking potatoes and sat down at the table, peeler in hand. "I'm guessing he wants me to tune it so it'll work on him, but he won't say that."

"Oh." Peter looked relieved, then guarded. "Um, Ray, what have you told him?"

"Everything I could remember from when Moonface knocked me out to the conversation we had about the last time we experimented with astral projection, and then everything from when he arrived to when I landed." Ray dug an eye from the potato with the tip of the paring knife and started on the other one. "He knows I'm leaving something out, but so far he hasn't pushed."

"Mmm. Which probably means he'll ask me; he'll figure you're too shy." Peter picked up the onion and began tugging the brown outer skin away.

"Do you want me to tell him, or is it none of his business?" Ray sliced the peeled potatoes in half and started grating them, careful of his knuckles.

"I don't know." Peter blew his forelock out of his eyes and reached for the paring knife. "I mean, if we'd slept together in the flesh, I could argue it either way - both that it's nothing that concerns him, and that we're his business parters and best friends; anything that affects us, affects him." Suddenly the mask fell away, and Peter looked anguished and elated at once. Green fire flashed in his eyes, and Ray remembered the same surrounding him like a halo. "Ray, _I remember your parents' funeral_ now."

Ray nodded slowly, the last slivers of potato turning to mush against the sides of the grater. "Yeah. I remember the last Christmas Charlie made it home for. Fourth grade?"

"Third, but that's not -" Peter broke off and groped for the right words. "We've left bits of ourselves, or at least our memories, in each other."

"Sparks from our souls." Ray scraped the potato shreds into a wet pile and reached for the halved onion. "Egon asked Winston where you were, but I could sort of feel you. Kind of like you know where your feet are, without having to look."

"And I could feel when you got here." Peter's hand closed on Ray's wrist. "Ray, that's closer than lovers get."

"More like the Corsican Twins." Ray flashed a playful smile. "If that means I'm going to feel it when you get hurt, you're going to have to be more careful working out."

"Ray, get serious." Peter leaned across the table. "I don't believe in soulmates, but - "

"But we, as souls, mated." Ray swallowed. "Are you sorry we did it, then?"

"What? No!" Peter sat back, eyes wide, then rubbed his forehead with the hand that hadn't been holding the onion. "But - maybe we rushed into things."

"We weren't sure we'd ever have another chance." Ray set down the rest of the onion half and stirred the shreds into the potato pile. "We still don't know - all we know for sure is that the device works on you, and probably Janine when she's not so tired she falls asleep instantly." He scooped the mess into a glass bowl. "I mean, yeah, it'll probably work on me - heck, now that I've had it done forcibly once, I might be able to project on my own - but we don't know yet."

"Yeah." Peter stared at the middle of the table as Ray got up and hunted for a frying pan and the vegetable oil. As Ray turned on the stove, Peter stood up slowly and wandered over, putting his hands on Ray's shoulders. "No, I'm not sorry we did it, Ray. I just didn't know what I was getting myself into."

"You and your intimacy issues." Ray turned half around and brushed a soft kiss against Peter's cheek, tentatively.

"Mmm." Peter slid a finger under Ray's chin and tilted his head up. "Let's try that again." His mouth closed on Ray's, slow and warm.

As they came up for air, Ray asked, "So does that mean you might be interested in trying it in the flesh, too?"

"More than interested." Peter smiled, a genuine smile this time. "But I think we ought to take this slow. We don't want to end up inadvertently swapping bodies or something even stranger." He draped his arms around Ray in a loose hug as the engineer precisely measured a quarter cup of shredded vegetables into the pan.

An embarrassed "ahem" announced someone's presence at the doorway. Very slowly, Peter turned around, one arm still on Ray's shoulder. "Oh, hi, Egon. We were just fixing Ray breakfast. Um, there's a part of the OOBE thing that we need to talk to you about, but it's kind of sensitive - can we go over it with just you and not the whole gang?"

"Sure," Egon said with eyebrows raised, the question clear in his voice. Ray glanced back over his shoulder, Peter's hand warm and solid on his back, the smell of the sizzling hash browns setting his stomach to rumbling, and decided that he could do with a few more new experiences in his life. Today, ideally, but if Peter wanted to go slow, that was fine, too. He'd waited this long.

"But breakfast first," he murmured, more to himself than to them.

"Yeah, I'm appreciating the earthly pleasures a bit more today myself," Peter replied. Egon gave them both the stare that said he would figure this out with or without them, and Ray laughed. "Just a few minutes, Egon. Then we'll explain. And if we're really lucky, maybe we'll get to demonstrate."

"I look forward to it, Ray," Egon said softly, an urgency in his voice Ray rarely heard, and suddenly Ray knew he understood.

Today was going to be fine, just fine.


End file.
